Audition (abstract)
Andrew M. Drinnan, David Morton · 1992
This demonstration presents Audition, an object-oriented language and environment designed to allow the easy creation of visual and interactive programs.It uses a metaphor of Performers and Stages, as first inspired by the XEROX Pam Rehearsal World project. Performers are the main interaction units. They are visible and mouse or message activated; sample types include DisplayPerformers, Turtles, Graphs, and Gauges. Performers are grouped on Stages; stages maintain local name spaces so that Performers can be named and intercommunicate using their local names. While Performers are members of a class, they may also be specialised through the addition of instance-specific behaviour and structure; this may also be inherited from other performers.Just as inheritance models is-kind-of relationships, performers collected on a stage visibly and logically model is-part-of relationships, in a more flexible way than instance variables. An application is usually just a specialised stage and its specialised performers. The performer-stage paradigm gives rise to models that are at once well factored across their participating performers and yet are fully encapsulated within a stage. Audition is a threaded interpreted language implemented in itself. At present we are using Audition to investigate planning aids and simulations for industrial situations.